Jeffrey Purdin

Jeffrey Purdin
Software Engineer
Emergint Technologies

Jeffrey Purdin started using SAS software in 2000 in his job as a biostatistical programmer at a clinical research facility. He was responsible for creating tables, graphs and listings for numerous clinical studies via Base SAS®, SAS® macros and SAS® Enterprise Guide®. From there he took a position as a government contractor in the occupational health care field. Purdin currently uses SAS to aggregate and analyze public health data for use in reporting mechanisms both internally and to the public. His next big project will be to use SAS® Enterprise Miner™ along with SAS/ACCESS® Interface to PC Files and SAS Enterprise Guide to mine text.

How long have you been using SAS®?

12 years.

What SAS products have you used in the past? What products and solutions are you currently using?

What is a problem you have solved using SAS?

I developed a SAS macro to assign double metaphone keys to a massive dataset for aggregation analysis of text patterns accounting for misspellings. I implemented macro-aggregated word frequency counts for text mining purposes.

What is the most innovative way you have used SAS?

I created a SAS program to generate and prefill word documents via DDE and ODS from PROC MIXED output datasets through a series of macros. This saved report writers hours and days of work.

What is your most memorable SAS moment?

That would be attending SAS Global Forum 2012 in Orlando, FL. Both the presentations and the accommodations were outstanding.

How has SAS changed in the time you have been using it?

Many great interfaces and functions have been developed, saving endless programming hours.

Have you ever attended a SAS users group meeting or SAS Global Forum? If yes, please list them.

I have attended SAS Global Forum 2012, SAS Users Group 2011 in Cincinnati, and multiple local SAS Users Group meetings at NIOSH in Cincinnati.

Has your work with SAS been influenced by any other members of the SAS community?

Experienced SAS co-workers were major influences when I first began using SAS. The information found at support.sas.com, as well as in online users groups is most helpful.